


Postscript

by sunsmasher



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 15:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The next fifteen minutes is a slow slaughter of everyone you have left in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Postscript

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frogeity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frogeity/gifts).



An Imperial-standard 2x3dent catches you through the meat of your shoulder and pins you to the wall of ruined sheet metal against which you fought. You scream, and feel your throat pulse against one of the gold-dipped tines pressed heavy to your neck.

Your assailant, a seadweller with horns like thorny branches, doesn’t care to watch you struggle. She pulls a pistol from her side and shoots for Dave’s chest as he leaps for her, nicking his ribs as he flashes left. She’s either been briefed on your brother’s talents or she’s just very smart, because when he blinks out again she’s already put two bullets where his head will be. You hadn’t really stopped screaming since she punched a hole in your shoulder, but when the contents of Dave’s skull find themselves splattered far across the concrete and his face freezes in a look of surprise, you start screaming louder.

The seadweller disappears into the melee, and you’d happily amputate to get after her. You wrench at the trident with your free hand, twisting a foot to brace yourself against the bloodied metal, but all it’s all give and tear in your shrieking muscles and none where you want it, in the metal suckered around the tips of the trident, and you’re held fast.

The crack of an Alternian-tech rifle splits the air, echoing even over the riots and urban warfare, and wrenching your neck around, you see Karkat fall. His jaw’s come free of its joint, tongue lolling from his throat, and his blood paints those around him. For a brief moment, they’re unaware of the color they wear. The air is full of dust and wordless screams, rainbow blood scuffed wide over broken steel and concrete, and he is your symbol, and he was the purpose, and all hope is lost without him.

The next fifteen minutes is a slow slaughter of everyone you have left in the world. Most of your revolutionaries, stupid and hopeful and each of them unworthy of this, died in the city. Here, in the rubble of your headquarters and home, Imperial guards take your family apart while you shriek and bleed out, nailed to the ruin.

John and Jade are swarmed, back-to-back and favoring limbs. Kanaya kills the sniper that took out Karkat then turns to meet some dozen soldiers fresh from the Fleet convoys. Her head is turned in your direction when they overcome her. Thunder wrenches the sky and you look up to see ships breaking apart in atmosphere. Fleet ships still hover just below orbit, just visible in formation, so you know with all certainty that it’s your post-Scratch counterparts burning up in reentry.

Your revolution has failed, utterly and without hope of redemption, and your death will be entirely in vain. The seadweller reappears among the ranks of soldiers personally ensuring that each of your friends breathes no more, and you have no energy left for pride or dignity or anything but the easiest possible way out. When she comes to a halt before you, hair tied tight at the back of her neck, not a strand out of place, you say to her, “For the love of God, just make it quick.”

The air settles into the chatter of soldiers and the groans of the wounded, and she smirks at you. She braces a boot against your ribs and pulls the trident free to the tune of your screams, garbled through the blood in your mouth, and you sag to the ground. She leans her weight against the red-dripping trident, hiding her needle-tooth smile behind one hand, and makes no move to end you. It angers you to the pit of your stomach and you struggle up on that fire.

“We lost!” you snarl in thick-mouthed Alternian, pulling your coat over the sucking wound in your shoulder. “We lost, you won, you have stalled the fucking revolution of empires for another thousand sweeps! Congratulations! Would you like to hear in detail how your boot heel tastes, or would the simple assurance that it's reminiscent of absolute shit suffice? You remain conquerors over all, so kill me. Kill me, or I’ll rip you from nook to nose.”

The seadweller lets you scream out, diatribe dissolving into blood-flecked gasps, and sweeps the trident towards the street. You follow the gesture and find the Condesce standing among her troops and her Fleet, terrible in her glory and righteous in her victory. A uniformed body shifts away and you see that her left hand is knotted in a dark tangle of hair and horns. Feferi kneels senseless by her feet, blood dried black across her pretty face.

“We have work for you yet, sweetie,” the seadweller grins, “The Empress is waiting.”

Despair cracks your mind, and in the black behind your eyes, old whispers take root.

\---

_Six seasons later_

Feferi releases your hand and steps to the threshold.

Light and sound and space boom wide, and you enter the coronation hall flanked by four of the Threshecutioner’s finest. A thick salt breeze pours in from the doors at the end of the hall, massive stone and gold affairs as tall as any of the Fleet shuttles you can see wallowing in the drowsy purple night, and pulls at the hems of the thousand solemn highbloods who turn to watch you pass.

Feferi leads, beautiful in tyrian and black and trailing skirts across the stone, skin shining in the dusty silver light of the hall. Midbloods pack the balconies and just audible over their sharp chatter is the rumble of the lowbloods surrounding the old palace, watching the feeds of the ceremony displayed on every wall of the capital. Sound echoes loud against the languid twists of the hall’s hundred stone columns.

The jagged, howling liturgies of the Highblood and his priests grow louder as you approach the massive dais at the end of the hall. Their language is hideous and most likely sacred, creaking under the weight of its own religion, but the Condesce is unmoved by their skull-faced chants. Against the star-dusted sky beyond the doors, she is enormous. She keeps her eyes fixed on her gathered elite until your party reaches the foot of the steps, then looks to you with a brief flash of a smile. You immediately feel as if you’ve been strung from a meat hook and judged for the tenderness of your ribs, and just barely keep your hands from closing into fists in your skirts.

You stop at the bottom of the steps, and Feferi rises. The guards remain with you, a wall of uniformed troll half again as tall as you, and behind you the last of the Legislacerator corps ceases their gossip in the balconies. Even the lowbloods have quieted, out in the night, and the only sounds are the priests, the sea, and Feferi’s heels against the stone. The Condesce smiles again to see her, and you entertain a brief fantasy of feeding the Empress her own entrails.

The ceremony is short and reeks of age. The lesser priests snarl and shudder in some proto-Alternian, a wide half circle disgusting with the smell of Faygo incense as the Highblood lowers the crown to Feferi’s bowed head. He roars something you almost understand and every troll in the hall drops to their knees, calling back an oath of fealty. Outside, the masses erupt in cheers, and Feferi rises to greet her tyrian coregent as an equal. The grim laugh track in your head gets a special kick out of that thought.

The Highblood leads the queens out onto the balcony, pale stone worn smooth by a thousand generations of ceremony, and your guards push you subtly to follow. The city is cacophonous below you, trolls lining every street, and when Feferi offers a wave, they erupt. She glances to you, still waving, and manages a tentative smile. You come up behind her to lean against the rail (they cheer you, too, the last of their alien saviors, and it kills you in small portions), and place a hand at the small of her back. She’s so much taller than you, now, your eyes barely level with her clavicle since her latest molt, but when she whispers to you through her smile you hear every word.

“How can they possibly think this is reel?” she hisses, eyes flicking to yours.

“To think otherwise would be to acknowledge our crushing failure,” you reply, folding your fingers into the sleek fabric of her dress. “In all honesty, I’m not sure we could ask that of them.”

“But they have to know!” she says, and even at your odd angle you can see her royal smile falter for a short second, white teeth half-swallowed by purple lips. “We all died in the warehouse! She’s just as strong as she ever was.”

“And yet here we stand,” you say, “And wave to them. Their heiress survives, and appears to come to power. She’s made them promises of reform, followed through on some. Already fewer helmsmen are taken, they think to themselves. The Legislacerators have slowed their brutal pace. The Church is quiet.”

Feferi turns to catch your eye, and through the flurry of her hair you see the Condesce lean against her culling fork. She doesn’t bother to wave to the crowds.

“But it won’t last,” Feferi says.

“No,” you reply, “it won’t last.”

A guard surfaces at your side. His low commands are harder to hear over the raucous boom of the crowds, but the message is clear. Something like, that’s enough chitchat, ladies. Something like, stick to the script or I’ll pit this ceremonial sickle through your thigh. After six months of this shit, you’ve become quite the interpreter of Imperial Threshecutioner growls.

As he leads you away by your elbow, back into the labyrinth caverns of the palace halls, you wonder if Karkat might have begun to sound like that, given more time and better friends.

\---

You drop from a gutter to an overhang to a ledge to the ground with a whump of rubbish and grime. The alley is rich with the smell of fishgut and dogshit, and Feferi laughs at the disgusted twist to your face when she lands beside you.

"Holy god, how did you and Vriska spend a season here?" you cough, "I am entirely certain I've encountered necrotic corpses sweeter-smelling than this."

Feferi laughs again, clapping you on the back. "You're such a landweller. The fisheries smelt wave worse than this! Especially after Vriska accidentally efisherated that one dude in the vents! Couldn't get the smell out of my hair for three perigees, you know?"

You smirk and tug her along as she giggles, pausing at the mouth of the alley to peer around the corner. You've got maybe two hours of night left and two of your old safe houses to search before Feferi's skin begins to sear and pop. The sky's begun to go a watery grey to the east, and the cramped brown scrabble of the Piers shrinks from its light. You wrap a shawl around your alien-strange hair and merge into the waterside crowd.

Even at the Piers it's hard to go unnoticed. The long swoop of Feferi's horns can't be hidden like the rest of her in tatty clothes and a grey coat, and dunking her head in soot only helps so much. You see a passing goldblood do a double take and you cringe. "And why, pray tell, aren't we still on the roofs?" you hiss as you step around something dark and tentatively liquid.

"They'd collapse," she shrugs. "Everything's carp in the Piers. Seasides, nobody's gonna know we were here."

A brownblood kid clutching his stoatdad tight to his chest offers you an awed wave. Feferi waves back, then catches your flat stare. "Whale, nobody who wants to krill us, at least," she amends, and drags you between two crumbling warehouses.

You stand watch as she works at the cellar door set into the concrete, tapping your de-majykked Needles against your thigh. You hear a few frustrated sounds of metal against metal, and call back, "Might we suggest trying the lock picks, fearless leader?" Feferi responds with an explosive CLANG, and you spin around to find the doors staved in and Fef leaning jauntily against her 2xtrident.

"Yeah, glub that shit," she laughs, and tosses the weapon into her sylladex. "Come on, I'll betta someone heard that."

You follow her into the dim with a conservative amount of eye rolling.

There's not much light beneath the warehouse, and most of it is filled with dust. The moon illuminates a faint purple circle around the stairs, so you warm up a brightworm while Fef trails her fingers along the walls. She disappears into the gloom just as you slap the worm to the ceiling with a gross suction. Thin blue light invades all but the darkest corners of the wide room, and all that's there for you to see is empty shelves. You sweep your foot through the drifts of ash collected on the floor and twist your Needles through your fingers. "Everything's been fed to the fires, it would seem," you call. "But was it us or them?"

"It was us," Feferi calls back, high voice muffled. "There's no damage to anyfin but the papers." She appears from behind a door you hadn't noticed, holding something limp and grimy. "Sea?" she grins, "they even left one of my squiddles! Condy wouldn't have been so kind."

Fef is indeed holding a squiddle, though you wouldn't have known it as such without her prompting. It's missing a leg and most of its stuffing, and wide patches of its plush skin have been burned black. She smiles at it, laughs in a little hiccup while you watch her, then pauses. Her expression shifts again into something you don't care to analyze, and she bends down to set the toy against the wall. When she joins you in the center of the room, you slip your hand into hers.

"So water we thinking," she says.

"There's been nobody here in a long time," you reply. "Too much dust and too few footprints. In all honesty, I suspect our fellows here cut and run as soon as word of our failures reached. Who was supervisor here?"

Feferi hums for a second, thinking. "Valrio something. Manche, probably, or Marche. Oliveblood kid, probably a sweep older than our lot. Used to play Fiduspawn with Tavros a shoal bunch."

"I don't recall him from among those that died in the streets. Might he have made it out?"

"Barracuda been," she offers, and starts for the stairs. "Next house I remember was out by the ferry terminals. Bit of a whelk, but if we—" Three steps up, she stops. You can see the ripple in her fins as she turns her head to listen and then the trident is out and she's bounding up the stairs and calling back behind her "Stay here!" This is of course the stupidest shit you've ever heard and you leap after her.

Aboveground the sky's awash in pre-dawn greys and in the nascent shadows of the alleyway you see two figures entwined, the height of one engulfing the other. The outer body is an adult, disheveled in an indigo uniform, and they surround someone whose claws you can see digging into the grimy coating of the wall. You level your Needles, and Fef growls, "Ok, chum, you better back the glub up." 

The adult staggers back, slow-cooked shock in his dopey eyes. One arm remains planted to the brick, and the lowblood kid he's got cornered looks between the three of you with terror slashed across his face. "What, I was, no, I paid my cash," the highblood slurs through thick lips, "Gave my money to the—I get to, I get to—"

Feferi strong-arms him against the wall and snarls. He quivers and whimpers, too fucked-up on sopor and cheap booze to cope with the rage in her face and an arm closes around your throat.

You gasp, see Feferi turn hear her shout feel the pulse of the circulatory system in the chest against which you've been pulled and your vision goes black. Not the black of asphyxiation, of hands crumpling your windpipe like a soda can because you've felt that and this isn't it, this is far more familiar, this is a whisper rising in your mind and tar welling in your throat and power untouched since the Game pouring into the Needles.

You speak something you don't understand and aim behind you. There's a crack, and a flash, and your back is dripping wet. Feferi stares at you. The kid is gone. The sopored officer is unconscious on the ground. "What did I do?" you ask, and your tongue feels too long in your mouth and it tastes of raw red meat and your ears ache to hear your own voice.

Feferi rams her trident through the unconscious troll's thorax and sweeps you up as he gurgles purple. She kisses you with teeth against your lip, dragging her hand down your bloody back, and you let her. One webbed hand brushes through your hair. Blood begins to wick across your ribs.

She pulls back from you with a giddy smile, laughs, "Oh, Rose, that was amazing! I'm so happy for you!" She retrieves her trident and pulls you into a run, fingers still laced tight in yours. Your mind is caught between silence and roar, the churning voices of the terrors loud but indistinct in their suggestions and questions and tidbits of prescience, and you ask, "Why run?"

Feferi laughs, she always laughs, and pushes you up a fire escape. "I'm pretty shore you just killed a Rear Admiral, stupid!"

\---

Feferi's suites are twice big as yours and four times as purple and she sits with you in the shower until long after you're clean of blood.

"So which of our fine highblooded friends was the Rear Admiral?" you ask, working the tangles from a long twist of her hair. The angle of the showerhead catches your knees in the spray and Feferi presses cool and smooth against you, shoulder to hip.

"The one you gutted," she says, watching your fingers. "You might have recognized him if you'd left him a face. I'm pretty shore it was Denneg, though."

You twist to look at her. "The nattering fuckwit who tried to make a helmsman of Sollux two sweeps ago?" you ask, raising an eyebrow.

"Just the motherglubber," she says, lips parting in a small smile. It fades, and she adds, "He shot down Sollux, though, and the others. Six seasons ago."

You lean your head back against the tile and sigh. There's a weight, still, in your sternum, like someone replaced the bones of your chest with dark iron bars. "So he was in command, then. Of the fourth squadron."

"Yeah," Feferi says, "the ones you and Terezi didn't know would come. That was him."

More weight spawns in your stomach, and you wonder how long you'd need to sit under the water before your skin just sloughed off. "And his compatriot?" you ask, "The would-be solicitor of underage wares?"

Feferi shrugs. "Didn't know his name. He had the bars for a commodore, though, so I'll bet he and Denneg came planetside for the coronation and decided to go cruising through the Piers before leaving orbit. Best fronds hitting the town and all."

You nod again. The showerhead leaks where it meets the wall, a steady curtain of warm water trickling down from a loose seal, and when you lean your head against the wall it runs over your eyes. Feferi's gills flap weakly against your side.

"Rose, we didn't do anyfin wrong," Feferi says, and out of the corner of your eye you can see her concern. "They deserved to die."

"Of course," you say, with certainty. You pick at the dry skin on your knuckles. It flakes away gray. Your palms are gray, too, discolor twisting up the brown skin of your arms to the base of your throat. You can still feel something there when you speak, like a clot of mud in your esophagus, and it makes your words drop heavy from your mouth.

Feferi rests her damp hand over yours, and says, "This is good, Rose! Reely!"

You nod again and cease your picking, but she seems unconvinced. She leans over to meet your eye, and her hair is a dripping dark curtain around you. Water shines off her cheeks. "The gods are giving you power, grumpygills! We could use some power nowadays!"

"Of course," you repeat, and lean forward to kiss her pout. "I'm being far too sea-rious, dear, forgive me."

"Oh my cod!" she laughs, gills snapping in wet glubs against her ribs. "You are the best girlfrond, Rose, it's you."

She swings a leg over yours and you close your eyes and begin to kiss her in earnest.

\---

You fall asleep on the couch next to her recuperacoon. You can hear her singing as you drift off, low and rolling and just for you.

\---

You keep searching, through the dim seasons and into the dark. Feferi leads you through the Piers and you lead her through the factories of the midblood districts, across the roofs of the convenience stores and smoke shops where Eridan once paid too much money for terrible cigarettes. The residue had stained the edges of your maps black, and Terezi used to snarl at him every time she licked a manifest and came up with a grey tongue.

You don't find Marche. You don't find anyone.

A season after the coronation, you notice your first blueblooded agent nonchalantly leaning against a wall, whispering into his collar. A local bar is closed down within four perigees. Dave and Kanaya used to drink in the back rooms, and Feferi starts doubling back to check for tails as you clamber through the city.

Just after the next equinox you witness your first public hanging in seven seasons. A goldblood charged with dodging the psionic draft is hanged from her neck until dead. You and Feferi watch her struggle from the roof of an adjacent shopping center, tucked between the AC units, and the next night you decide to stay in. You think Feferi sings to you, again, as dawn pours white and angry into your room, but you’re too tired to understand the words.

Events are planned for you during the waking hours, functions and signings and hearings you attend as Coregent and Adjutrix, smiling faces of the people's will. In the atrium of the old Decapitol, Feferi signs a decree that will expand a number of older hiveblocks in midblood neighborhoods in preparation for the new hatch group's entrance into the city. You stand by her shoulder in a trim green suit and the grimreaporter's flashbulbs near blind you as she signs her name in looping tyrian ink, crown nestled in the thick twists of her hair.

The papers will later whisper of what exactly Feferi signed into law, of barrels of oinkbeast meat and payouts to seadweller corporations. They'll whisper of the Coregent's perpetual Threshecutioner guard, and how it's only grown stronger since her coronation. Does the Coregent no longer trust her people? they'll ask. Has she lost touch with the troll on the street?

Your next night out, a troll tries to mug Feferi in the fluorescent light behind an all-night grubmeat diner. She breaks his arm before he realizes who she is, and you leave him on a street corner. The incident repeats itself many times in many ways, and you begin to lose patience with the lot of it.

A half-season before Ascension, arms full of groceries in the lowblood slums, you find Marche.

\---

The streets between the tenements are thin and wasted, weaving haphazard around the flickering streetlights at every second intersection, and their weak light steals color from Feferi's skin. She waits for you in the shadow of redblood hiveblock and when you touch her arm, she asks "So, find anyfin?" as she turns.

"Our trail is as clean as Troll Will Smith's grub-friendly beatz," you reply, brushing a few flecks of the hiveblock's paint off your shoulder. "I followed as far back as the Cavalreaper's Ornamental Water Jet Pumper and saw neither hide nor horn of anything resembling a tail. Whatever we heard back in Gallowscliff must have been a product of paranoia, I suppose."

"Well, if you're shore," she shrugs, and fastens her hood around her horns, stepping into the street. "I'm thinking we splash around the bars a bit first, seaing as Vriska's contacts always—"

"Wait," you say, throwing an arm across her waist. "The greenblood you said worked in the south Piers, did he have backswept horns, hint of a notch in one ear?"

Feferi twists, eyebrows knit in surprise. "Yeah, actually. But I didn't tell you that, did I?"

"Not once," you say. "He's standing across the corner."

He is, at that, laden down with thin plastic grocery bags and ducking through the crowd, and Feferi starts after him. You see her mouth open, her shoulders rise, and before she can call his name you pull her into the door of a moldering tattoo parlor.

"Might we try for a slightly more private meeting?" you hiss, and she rolls her eyes.

"Fineeee," she drawls, pulling out the e. "It's not like anyone woulda cared, you know how lowbloods play it close to the gills."

"Indulge me," you snap, and slip back into the crowd.

Marche leads you deep into the city, the hiveblocks shrinking and crumbling and growing close on either side until you feel like you're walking down the deep, uneven groove of a record, waiting for a needle to black out the sky. Rain beings to spit, a hissing drizzle that gathers in your hair and runs cold down the back of your neck. You keep to the walls.

The streets begin to empty, shallow black puddles replacing breathing trolls with every block. The few trolls you pass don't recognize you. Those that do say nothing, and watch you go with stony faces. One girl hisses at you, teeth bright in her dark face, but her partner pulls her along before you can do more than frown. Feferi fidgets beside you.

The purple moon's low in the sky when you mark begins to shift, juggling bags between hands as he fishes for his keys. You and Feferi pause by a dumpster as he lets himself into a leaning ruin of a hiveblock, then knock on his door.

He cracks it open, sees the two of your dripping on his front step, and groans, “Oh, hell no.” When he tries to slam it closed, you slap a palm against the wood.

“Mr. Marche,” you say, and your voice is low beneath the hiss of the rain. “As you may have observed, it is an absolutely disgusting night. We have spent quite a lot of time in it, looking for you, as well as a number of seasons searching before this evening. Would you be so kind as to let us in?”

Marche looks from you to Feferi to the trident Feferi’s pulled from her sylladex and he swings the door open with a heavy sigh.

“Fine,” he groans. “Just get the fuck inside before someone sees you.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Marche,” you smile, and follow Feferi inside. He’s still got a bag hanging from his wrist as he closes the door.

Marche’s hive, with its minimalist approach to furnishing, almost looks large. You can hear voices in other rooms, but he offers you no explanation and stands just off center of the threadbare rug, trying to stare you down. When that fails, he looks to Feferi and asks, “Why are you here?”

Feferi seems wrong-footed by the accusation in his voice, and huffs, “We just wanted to sea if you were still alive! If anyone was still alive, reely.”

Marche barks a laugh, crossing his arms over his chest. “Like fuck. If you two had any intention of keeping us alive even a second longer, you would have stayed the fuck away from us.”

“Us,” you break in, “So you are not the only one to make it out unscathed?”

Marche sighs, and scrubs at his face with one hand. “Yeah,” he mutters, “It was more than me. Mostly the dudes in the Piers, I think. A couple of ‘em are in the next room, since their hives got trashed by the police.”

So don’t give me any bullshit about wanting to check on us,” he growls, glaring again, “’Cause if you gave two shits about us you’d stay away and leave us to rot in the peace. Why the fuck are you really here?”

You open your mouth to protest, to offer assurance of your intentions, and it begins to occur to you that you’re not quite sure what your intentions here are when you hear Feferi reply, “Whale, I guess we’re here to start things up again!”

Marche scoffs. Your jaw drops.

“Start things up again?” you hiss, rounding on Feferi. “What things exactly did you have a mind to start up again?

Marche is lost to you as Feferi takes a half step back, eyebrows disappearing into her hood. “The revolution, of course!” she answers, tightening her grip around her trident. “We’ve found Marche, we can find the otters, and shore we don’t—“

“The revolution?” you almost laugh, “Have you not been present the past six months? Did you not see each and every individual who ever mattered to us slaughtered? What revolution?”

There’s a muffled, dirty clatter outside and Feferi snaps into anger, shouts back, “The one they all glubbing died for! Were you just gonna give up on that?”

Your face twists into an ugly expression.

“What did you think we could do? We have nothing! We have no armies, no strategies, no strategists! We are pawns of a galactic tyrant and our lives continue at her pleasure!”

“That wasn’t the glubbing question and you know it! Did you _give up_?”

Her voice echoes against the bare concrete walls of the hive. Heads have appeared around the door, watching you stare Feferi down in the sudden quiet. You realize you’ve put your weight on your back foot, like you’re ready to lunge, or run.

“Yes,” you finally snarl, and you hate the triumph in her eyes. “I gave up. Our lives were razed to the ground. When there is nothing to be done, at some point you must do nothing.”

“Then why are you here,” she asks, and again and again and again you have nothing to say. Feferi stands taller in your silence.

“It’s not over until I coddamn say it’s over,” she spits, and turns back to Marche. A whisper in your ear, low and slow and dripping age, recommends violence. You grit your teeth.

There’s a knock at the door.

Marche shakes off his shocked torpor and growls at you to stay where you are. You shift from foot to foot as he crosses the room, Feferi staring steely-eyed into the middle distance. One unnamed troll whispers to another behind you, and you can hear them attempt to muffle laughter in their hands. Whispers still roil your thought processes. A thin whine edges into your hearing, stuttering and incandescently irritating, and it grows overtones and harmonies and oscillations as you look to Feferi and Marche behind her.

Marche opens the door at the second knock and a bullet removes an eye and a half.

“RUN!” you roar as police pour into the hive.

Feferi swings, rips through two Imperial stomachs as blue uniforms swarm you, and you sprint for the back door. It snaps open behind the weight of your shoulder and you’re in a kitchen, cramped and gray as Feferi shoves into you from behind, dripping blood down your back. She shouts and kicks, slamming the door behind her, and you see a flash of troll disappearing up a flight of stairs.

“Come on!” you shout and race for the steps. Heavy boots break into the kitchen and a bullet grazes your thigh.

The stairs are steel and rust, railings gone, and every landing is a locked door. You try the first, then the second, then you stop trying and run for the roof. Feferi pounds a step behind you and the police surge after a flight below. One shoots and you duck and bullets pock the cement behind your head. Feferi turns to engage and you roar, “Keep going!”

Six floors up the stairs end in a steel door marked ROOF in peeling paint. It’s locked, so Feferi puts her back into it and the metal buckles around her foot. You shove through into the open air as the first Imperial troll mounts the landing. Feferi punches at the door as you sprint clear and warps the metal to its frame, seadweller blood dripping from her knuckles.

You spin, looking for the escape, but there’s nothing. Left is an empty lot, right is a building twice the height of yours, and police shout from every side. The sidewalk swarms. Feferi heaves for breath to your right, blood trickling from her side.

And then there’s a troll in your face, a brownblood no younger than you, and she’s shouting, “Did they follow you?!”

You recognize her from behind the kitchen door and she roars through your surprise, “We covered our fucking tracks day and night, they didn’t have a fucking _clue_ where we were, and within ten minutes of your arrival Marche is dead. _They followed you!”_

Two others are behind her, terrified to their boots, and you shout rather than think. “We are not at fault for your fuckups! Whatever brought the Empire down on your heads, it wasn’t us!”

“My head?” she laughs, and she’s suddenly petty in her terror. “What makes you think you’re getting out of here?”

You want to take her to pieces, rip muscle from bone and throw her into the street but the door to the stairway is creaking open, highblood bodies piling against it, and Feferi levels her trident as the metal explodes off its hinges.

Uniforms surround you and you fight them as Feferi disappears from view, dodging bullets and nightsticks and ramming your Needles through a blueblood’s skull when she swings for your head. Someone catches you about the waist, tries to crush you as they pull your feet off the ground, and your mind bleeds black across your skin and grimdark whips in clouded tentacles off your limbs. Your captor screams, and falls away.

The whispers resurface, louder again than in the Piers, and now when you strike there’s real power and bodies drop. The terrors ooze thick through your mind, whispering where to point and when to shoot and you begin to listen, begin to let them into the parts of you previously closed. You aim, and you kill, and for every policeman that splutters and dies two more take their place.

When you duck to dodge one steel baton, slick smoke pouring across the roof, another catches you across the back of the head, and you fall to the ground with a nasty, choked noise. Bodies pile on top of you and there’s no room for air in your flattened lungs.

Terrors are replaced with the dull, painful white of a head wound and with your cheek pressed flat to roof you can see Feferi pinned, bluebloods layered heavy on top of her.

The brownblood’s body lies 30 feet away, piled with her friends, and one of the Legislacertor’s mobile units wipes her sword clean behind them. Zipties close around your wrists and ankles.

The world spins and zooms and light blooms blurry and painful in your vision, and a boot to the ribs rolls you onto your back.

A seadweller with horns like thorny branches presses her heel into your shoulder and smiles. Her epaulettes drip rank. With a tongue that feels too big in your mouth, you say, “Congratulations on the promotion, Orphaner. How we have moved up in the world.”

“Oh, bless you, Adjutrix,” she laughs, and stabs into your shoulder. You shriek. “Always have something kind to say. Tell me, is my boot heel still reminiscent of absolute shit?”

The Legislacerator swims into view to your left and begins to list your charges. There are a lot of them, and you stare above you into the light-polluted night as you are charged with Conspiracy, Treason, and a thousand other acts of terrible illegality. They pull a coarse hood over your face as Feferi screams obscenities.

\---

The trial is short, and very much to the point. As Feferi explains in a low whisper, lips pressed close to your ear, they need not make time for your defense. Nor for your execution, which will come later. A third of the courtroom is filled with the pitchy mass of His Honorable Tyranny, and the Condesce has designs on an audience far larger than that which fits around his shadow.

You will die on live air, somewhere with good light and decent acoustics, and the stench of your blood will linger in the nostrils of every viewer in the conquered star systems. Feferi told you as much, in the chill of your cell. You'd asked her why she spoke of this death with none of her usual cheer, your eyes fixed to the gray brick walls. She'd replied that the gods didn’t care how you died. But the Empire likes it slow, she'd said, and she’d watched the water drip, second by second, from the faucet.

The Legislacertor finishes reciting the list of your crimes. The details are unintelligible, so you don't bother to listen. He addresses His Honorable Tyranny, and your bones shake at the snarling echo of a reply. He addresses the audience, and they scream for your death.

When you turn to face the assembled rows, it's the angriest trolls who meet your eyes. They bristle with blind fury, calling you traitors, blaming you for all their woes, and you can't fault them for accepting a scapegoat when presented one. It's the quieter trolls who bother you, the trolls who, when you look to them, turn away. Their faces are unfamiliar to you, but not the despair laid thick across their shoulders. They look like you, and you can't fix it.

It's almost a relief to be led away in chains.

\---

You are close to sleep. Feferi is a cool parenthesis at your back and the stone of the cell bench seeps heat from your bones. You shudder as you dream.

You dream of the dark, and deep oceans peppered with dim galaxies. Horror swirls vast around you in a rat’s nest of tentacles, teeth, and ancient machination. Whispers enclose you, and cradle you, and their language slips towards coherence as they embrace you.

They whisper power and welcome and triumph and devotion. You open your arms to them, open your mouth, and they fill your lungs and stomach and bones. They plant little suckers across your skin, kissing and coaxing as you breathe tar into your blood and come to resemble them, in all their simplicity and purpose. They love you, and tell you so in a song you’ve heard before.

You’ve heard that song before.

 _You’ve heard that song before_.

You lurch into lucidity. One of Feferi’s hands is at your stomach, tapping a beat against your shirt as she sings softly into your hair. You shove away from her, rolling onto the floor, and she gasps, “What’s —“

“Tell me what the song means,” you say, lungs burning like you’ve just swum a marathon. You voice doesn’t sound right.

“Rose, I—“

“Tell me what it means!” you shout.

“I’m not shore,” she says, and her shock has hardened. She sits upright, and hair cascades down her back. “My mother sung it to me.”

“Yes,” you laugh, panic edging down your spine. “Your horrorterror squidfuck mother. And what did the kraken say it meant, when she sung it?”

You lean against the wall, one knee to the floor as your lungs refuse to fill and Feferi snarls, “It welcomes the gods, basshole. It grants you dreams.”

“And does it work?” you ask, and almost choke on it halfway. There’s something squirming in your throat.

“You tell me,” she says, and you double over.

You’re on your hands and knees, hair in your eyes, and your thoughts are not your own. The horrorterrors flood your mind, all the doors you once kept locked now opened and oiled and shaved to fit. They come singing, and their song is a harmony to Feferi’s melody still in your head. Brown and grey battle for territory across the backs of your hands.

You feel a hand on your back. “You knew,” you gasp, “This was your intention.”

“Wasn’t it yours?” Feferi asks, and when you glance right her knees touch the floor beside you.

“Ascension is tomorrow,” she says. “They’ll krill us tonight and the next hatchgroup into the city will never know we existed. They’ll brainwash our hatchmates into loyalty as soon as they hit space, and anyone who resists will be shark food. After tonight, us and everyone we know vanish from fishtory. Maybe if we’re lucky a record or two will survive, but that’ll be it. We won’t just be dead—we’ll be erased. Totally gone. Unless we do somefin right now.”

You glance up at her, through the white curtain of your hair. She looks a bit sad, a bit apologetic, and very certain. You heave suddenly, your insides tying knots to make a sailor proud, and she brushes your hair away from your face.

“So, this is it,” you gasp between spasms.

“Yeah,” she smiles, leaning down to meet your eye. “This is it.”

Her irises are ragged around the edges when you look, her blood color beginning to tint her sclera. You wish you could go home.

“I should have known,” you say, and stop fighting it.

They swallow you whole, every cell subsumed in gray, and you feel so much better for it. You are embraced and enshrouded and enclosed, held close in the darkness and the depths, and lightning floods your veins. You crackle like a Tesla coil, black bursting off you in long daggers, pocking the wall in shotgun blasts, and you could kill at least three cholerbears right now. You could even kill an Empress, with some help.

The roar in your mind returns to whispers, soft and knowing. You stand. Feferi beams as she unbends, and the whispers coo kindnesses when you look up at her. Her hand feels warm on your shoulder.

Your cell is as spare as you’d expect when you look around— a bench, a sink, and a steel toilet separated from the corridor by a thick plexiglass wall. A small vent in the plastic allows for air, and you say, “Palace subbasements?”

“Looks like it,” she responds, and you don’t bother to wonder how she can understand the broodfester tongues as she steps away. Your hair rises off your head like you’ve swallowed a Van de Graaff generator and you place a smoking palm to the plastic. Power shoves into the plexiglass and blackened slag paints the corridor, fumes rising in poisonous clouds as an alarm beings to shriek. Feferi leaps past you into the hall, coughing into her sleeve and you slide your fingers into the molten polymer by your feet.

You pull your Needles smoking from the mess and follow Feferi out, inky tendrils foaming off your feet. She rips a pipe from the wall, steel screeching as it tears, and steam billows in huge clouds from its orphaned roots. It mixes in disgusting gusts with the vaporized plastic, and you’re quite pleased your lungs have gone superfluous. Feferi’s pulled her shirt up over her nose, gills quivering as she struggles for breath. She’s beautiful, you think, wreathed in your smoke and trailing her ragged pipe against the floor.

The alarm screeches, high and sharp and tearing at your ears, and at the edges of the door out of your cellblock, red light pulses. Feferi holds the pipe in a batter’s grip and you smile so wide you feel your cheeks could rip right through. “Ready?” you ask, garbled and with too many consonants. She nods, not daring to open her mouth to the poison, and adrenaline makes you buoyant.

“Well, let’s go pay our respects,” you smile, and blast the door off its tracks.

The guards waiting for you are a mildly funny joke, sneaking a shot or two in before you can puncture their innards, or Feferi separate their heads from their necks with a gruesome crunch. One tries to tackle her, head just level with her chin, and she throws him overhand against a wall. He slides down into a pool of his own blood with a generous crackling of bones, and you blast a hole in his thorax just to be sure. The alarm attains new heights of terrible shriek, a chorus emerging as more and more of the Palace catches on, and Feferi nicks a guard’s semi-automatic with gory hands. The gaseous remains of your escape flood the ceiling, the strobing red light of the alarms diffusing through the smoke to dapple the scene with your blood color. You wipe your Needles off on a guard’s shirt and run for the stairs.

\---

“So where exactly are we going?” Feferi shouts as she runs a Cavalreaper through. Blood spurts from a gash in her fin, streaming purple down her neck, but she ignores it to whip her pipe into another Cavalreaper’s ribs. He goes down with a splutter and a crunch, and she steps nimbly around his body.

“Throne room,” you call back, dodging a sword swipe to the head. Your assailant goes wide-eyed at your eldritch tongues, so you punch a hole between her lungs. Horrortentacles impale the soldier behind you, splattering your back in blood, and the terrors whisper happily at the smell.

Feferi shoots a latecomer through the head as she rounds the corner and asks, “How far off would you say?”

“As far as I recall, left at the end of the hall, down the stairs, and then it should be on the right. There’ll be a good deal of gold around, I expect.” You hop over one troll’s legs and around another’s head. Smoky tentacles trail after you, lingering over the corpses.

The hallway is an antique, its décor unchanged since the last time the Palace was regularly inhabited during the Summoner’s era. The fine carpets are now heavily stained, and the paling light of the green moon clashes against the Cavalreaper’s uniforms. You expect they weren’t expecting you, with their dress golds and their ornamental swords. Feferi pulls a trident from the wall with a grin. It looks decorative in the same way that mercury used to be decorative, and she slings it against her shoulder like it was made to fit. You can hear faint boots in the halls behind you.

Around the corner are waiting for you three trolls. Two high-ranking Threshecutioners, easily dispatched with a boom of black lightning and the last of Feferi’s clip, and the Orphaner. You’re absolutely delighted to see her again, and tell her so. Feferi translates. The Orphaner is admirably unperturbed.

“Come and get me, devilspawn,” she grins, and ducks your Needles’ blast. Feferi runs for her with a shout, and she blocks Feferi’s trident with her own harpoon, catching its tines against the haft. She twists, trying to disarm Feferi, and you shoot for her feet.

The Orphaner dances aside, barely keeping her legs. Feferi laughs and swings again as you flank her. The Orphaner parries again, barely sidesteps another of your blasts and suddenly she’s against a wall and Feferi buries her trident in the wall around her neck. The Orphaner’s gills flutter against the metal with her every breath, and her eyes are half-feral when you place a Needle under her chin. You love it, and so do the terrors.

“You gonna krill her or what, Rose, we got places to be,” Feferi asks behind you. She’s sucking down breaths, muffled gasps between every other word, and you wonder how badly she’s hurt. There’s a sizable hole in your own torso, but the horrorterrors eat away your pain and smoke pools in the bloody folds of your clothing. You’ll get to it later.

“Give me a second here, I’m trying to think how best to make the Orphaner here’s death as painful as possible,” you hum, pressing the Needle deeper into the Orphaner’s fleshy bits. Your soon-to-be victim has panic in her face. “I owe her an agony or two.”

“That’s wonderfoam,” Feferi says, and you can hear her roll her eyes over your shoulder, “But the throne room’s just down the stairs and she’ll keep till we get back. Just pull out some of her absorptive alimentary hoses or somefin and we can be on our wave.”

You can hear boots again, and far-off shouts. Feferi puts a hand to your shoulder and leaves a bloody print. You sigh and stab into the Orphaner’s gut, skewering her easily through her lightweight armor. She chokes, eyes wide and rolling, and scrabbles at her abdomen with desperate hands. The trident around her neck catches her against her chin when her knees fail, your tentacles tickling at her feet.

“Alright,” you concede, turning down the hall, “on to the next stop—”

“Wait!”

You spin. The Orphaner is just barely standing, head caught at an awkward angle between the trident and her own horns. Despite the blood pouring down her front, she looks suddenly confident, and you frown.

“You’re going the wrong way,” she smiles. Her needle teeth are dark with blood.

Feferi reacts first, asks, “What the glub are you talking about?” with a crease at the top of her nose.

The Orphaner’s smile doubles in size. “The Empress is away from the throne. The natives of Omicron Persei 8 just deposed their governor, and she’s going out with the Fleet to put some fear in their orphans. Call just came in.”

“You’re lying,” you scoff, and she can’t understand you, you know she can’t but she laughs like she does and spits blood down her chin.

“In fact, she might still be planetside. You girls got up here quick. I’d try the shuttle bays if I were contemplating regicide.”

Feferi’s trying to catch your eye. You’re still close to the Orphaner, close enough to see how her claws have broken against the trident, and the boots are getting closer. Metallic sounds echo down the corridor.

“She’s lying,” you say, pounding certainty into your voice. “Let’s go.”

You turn for the far end of the hall, whipping blood off your Needles as you start to run. Feferi appears beside you, a Threshecutioner’s sickle in her hands. As you come up on the corner, inky smoke trailing behind you like a flag, you hear the Orphaner shout, “Just up the stairs, there, ladies!”

The way into the next hall is clear, and the sun’s beginning to rise in the east. The fine tile floors creep with red as you skid to a halt in front of the downward stairs. Elevators stand to your right, and stairs going up wait behind you. You pause.

“We knew the Omicronians were going to revolt,” Feferi says. When you turn to look she’s leaning heavily against one wall, slowly staining it tyrian. One long horn is cracked and chipping down its length.

“We weren’t certain,” you reply, looking back down the steps. The lights have been dimmed as day approaches and shadows loom in the stair well.

“Roxy was in contact with them, we knew they were planning something—“

“But we weren’t certain!”

Your breath comes hard. You’re starting to feel the pain now, spreading in deep lines from a hole above your navel. Someone shot you there, at some point, though you’ve now forgotten who or when.

“We weren’t certain, then,” you say, and you hate the pain that creeps into your voice. “And we have to be absolutely certain now. Because whichever way we choose, the guards will catch us before we can turn around.”

Feferi’s looking at you with surprise, and you realize you’re speaking English. The terrors are quiet in the depths of your mind.

“We have to choose now,” you say. “Now or never again.”

“Alright,” she says. “Down we go.”

You leap into the dark.

\---

Your name is Feferi Peixes. You are ten sweeps old, and the woman beside you measures her age by another world’s sun. She is shorter than you, and acts smarter, and you’d spend your whole life protecting her, even though she was the one to pledge that to you some three and a half sweeps ago, when you admitted to her that you feared the revolution would kill you. You wonder if she’d make the same promise now, with her skin changed as gray as yours and your blood left on her shoulder. You could wonder about a lot of things, were your vascular pump not shoving blood out of you by the pint.

At least a third of your body is devoted to screaming pain, you calculate, and it’s on sheer coddamn will that you stand on a leg slashed almost to the bone. The door to the throne room fisheyes as you stare at it, gold plating blooming large and liquid in your pain-addled eyes, and you can still hear the guards behind you, no louder or softer then they’ve ever been. Rose is quiet, and her hair twists in a breeze you can’t feel.

You hope she doesn’t hate you. You hope you did the right thing.

“Did you imagine you’d die like this?” she asks, and her eyes are fixed to the face of the door.

“Nah,” you say. “I don’t think I ever imagined I’d die until right now. Not even when I was dead.”

Rose smiles, and you love the weird shape of her teeth, smooth and square and white as pearls.

You open the door.


End file.
